Archive for May, 2015

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch infuses magic into the police procedural. The narrator is Peter Grant, a young London Metropolitan Police Constable newly apprenticed to a wizard. It’s a strangely compelling read that I could not put down until I finished it.

The novel is deeply rooted in the day to day realities of policing modern London and offers humor and a number of twists. Because the narrator is only an apprentice magician he understands some of the hows for performing magic but little of the why so he is conducting three investigations in parallel: the first is to understand not just the surface skills needed for magic but the real mechanisms for spooky action at a distance, the second is to find a way to resolve a dispute between a number of powerful river spirits, and the third is to uncover the real culprit behind a series of assaults and murders.

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This weekend I attended the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015. New this year was a Startup Pavilion with about 20 companies selling their products and looking for early adopters. Through out the show, I also found many startups looking for support for their kickstarter campaigns.

3D printing is overhyped and its implications are not well understood. It will be twenty plus years before there is a 3D printer in most homes due to limitations of the cost of the machine, material, obtaining software and learning how to use the software. Other fundamentally problem that prevent 3D printers being adapted by the public are to understanding of design, physics, and material science and a change of behavior of making things at home.

There are broadly three categories of challenges a new product must address: it has to be feasible, it has to be desirable and it has to be profitable. Below is a simple checklist to help you evaluate product ideas.

These excerpts from The Verger by W. Somerset Maugham highlight some practical truths of entrepreneurship. Many a successful has been started based on careful observation, in particular seeing what’s missing.

Entrepreneurs who limit themselves to what they could learn if their prospects lacked the power of speech adopt what I call a veterinary marketing model. It’s not a viable approach to market exploration.